We have seen drones deployed with automated landing and charging pads, and mobile payment solar power in rural Africa. Now sitting somewhere inbetween the two is Mobisol, a company that offers solar energy alternatives to low income communities in developing countries.

Mobisol currently has customers in over 40,000 solar homes in rural Tanzania and Rwanda. The Berlin-based company uses a pay-to-purchase model for the solar panels, and customers can pay the monthly installments using mobile phones. As a part of their new Solar Air Distribution network, Mobisol is adding drone recharging pads to the roofs of its customers’ homes, so that a network of delivery drones can travel longer distances by stopping off at the charging points. The drones can leapfrog from community to community, potentially delivering equipment to new locations to deploy more of Mobisol’s solar energy service.

Mobisol hope the network will expand solar energy to the off-grid market, as well as grow the business into an air delivery network by 2017. What other energy infrastructure could potentially have dual functions too?